Saw
James Wan, 2004,
I’ll give Saw a little more credit this time than I did on my first viewing years ago. The basic premise is the stuff of a decent popcorn thriller, Cary Elwes and Leigh Whannell are mostly serviceable in their roles, and the central, grimy bathroom set—the only one purpose-built for the film—is a skin-crawling feat of extremely unsavory production design. But ironically, everything gets pretty crappy whenever we leave that bathroom. The cheap, generic sets look like trash, the attempt at a car chase is downright laughable, and perhaps most importantly, Jigsaw’s theatrics are just eye-rollingly dumb. His robe, his pig mask, his stupid little puppet; none of it is remotely scary, and his sociopathic quasi-profundity possesses little of the gravitas its writers seem to think it does. It all feels kind of like a soap opera version of Se7en, which could be fun, but it’s too humorless to embrace its camp potential.